EBL: Please tell EBL readers your correct title.

Lane: Meredith A. Lane, currently Professor, Dept of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Curator, Natural History Museum, University of Kansas. After 1 July 1999, Vice President, Biodiversity Group, Academy of Natural Sciences (Philadelphia).

EBL: Please tell EBL readers who you are.

Lane: From June of 1997 through January of 1998, I was employed by the National Science Foundation (on an interagency personnel agreement with the University of Kansas) and detailed to the National Science and Technology Council, where I worked in the Environment Division of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Specifically, I was the Study Executive Director for the PCAST Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystems, which was chaired by Dr. Peter Raven and comprised 19 highly respected scientists from around the country.

EBL: You were telling me about the title pun, "Teaming with Life".

Lane: If you have one of the printed copies of the Report, you can grasp the content by looking only at the pull quotes (the short bold-face statements out on the sides of the pages) and the boxes and not have to read the whole text. The Report is designed that way because many Executive branch and congressional staffers don't have time to do anything but quickly glance at documents. One pull quote (on page three) says how research within and funded by the federal government and our economic system need to be teaming with life, "t-e-a", in order to keep the earth teeming, "t-e-e", with life.

EBL: When you say teamwork do you mean interdisciplinary research

Lane: Well, I mean interdisciplinary research, but I also mean, and the Report also meant, the teaming together of environmental researchers and NGOs (non-government organizations) that are dedicated to the preservation of the environment, with companies and industries and government because industries are using resources at all times. The report is intended in part to show them how resources are not necessarily continually renewable, that they have to be used in a sustainable way. At the same time it tells the government agencies that are involved with managing our nation's natural resources to manage them in a way that is sustainable and in concert with private industry and scientific researchers to produce some of the answers about how that has to be done. The pull quote (page three of the report) says, "Living sustainably into the future means teaming with life to keep Earth teeming with life." The idea is that the slight government reorganization was suggested to support the notion of teeming with life, but to do that we have to do the teamwork thing. The whole point of this Report really has to do with that notion of teaming together, that people in all walks of life with all sorts of different world views need to come together and work together in order to sustain ourselves into the future. The way we sustain ourselves is to sustain our ecosystems and biodiversity. We need to get to a point where everyone understands that we sustain ourselves by sustaining our biodiversity and ecosystems.

EBL: Amen. I certainly believe that.

Lane: A large point of the Report is that environmentalists and people who really, really, really care about other species as much as they care about humanity, and persons who care about humans and don't really worry about the rest of the species on the earth simply because it has never occurred to them that they need to do so, need to educate one another about the realities of each of those worlds. In order to sustainably live on the resources that we have and make the best use of them those two worlds need to come together rather than being diametrically opposed to one another. The "teaming" of the title has to do not only with humanity getting together and teaming up with the rest of creation, it has to do with factions of humanity forming teams to do things in a more reasonable way as well.

EBL: Which is easier said than done.

Lane: Well yes it is, and that's a large part of the way the Report was written, to attempt to demonstrate that those factions of society who do not currently hold the strict environmental ethic that other factions of society hold actually will benefit from taking the environment into greater account, more than they will if they just ignore it. That is the reason for the really large section on economic research and valuation of environmental services. It's not that anyone on the panel absolutely one hundred percent believes that the best way to save biodiversity is by putting an economic value on it or on environmental services. But at the same time, everyone on the panel understood that in order to make an impact on the economic sector it was necessary to show that environmental services, which have always been taken for granted, actually have an economic value that should be figured into cost benefit analysis. Geoff Heal from Columbia University, an economist, and a person who is both an ecologist and an economist, Gretchen Daily from Stanford University, were members of the Panel, and helped provide the understanding of the economic side of things to the Panel as a whole. The assumption has always been that what the environment provides to us is free, it's there, we don't have to worry about it. To approach people who think in economic terms, at least the majority of the time, one has to be able to put dollar figures on things that affect those people personally or at least in their business-to show them that yes, this is of significant interest to you, whether or not you happen to be a person who likes to go out in the woods and camp and enjoy nature just for enjoying nature. In order to get society to realize that for society to survive it must support the environment and restore the environment it's necessary to prove to society that the environment is in fact supporting it. That's the underlying philosophy that the panel took in trying to get that message across in a way that will be understood by people who spend their lives dealing with dollars and bottom lines and may or may not have in their awareness the services that the environment provides to whatever their industry is.

EBL: How did the "Teaming with Life" report come about

Lane: In 1996, the President requested of his Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) that they report to him on what they consider to be major scientific efforts that the Nation should be addressing for the near and long term future.

EBL: Then PCAST is a pre-existing group

Lane: PCAST is a pre-existing group, yes.

EBL: And they meet every year

Lane: They meet about once a quarter. There are eighteen people on PCAST and those persons are appointed for their prominence in scientific research and education and science as it is conducted in industry. If you look on page vii of the PCAST report that we are talking about, there is a list of the PCAST members at the time that this Report was prepared. They have limited terms and the membership does rotate over time.

EBL: How often do they rotate

Lane: I think about every three years but I'm not absolutely sure that that's the correct number.

EBL: This is strictly from this President or this is something that's been ongoing

Lane: Various Presidents can organize their advisory groups in different ways. This President has been very reliant on the PCAST, which is the non-governmental arm of the National Science and Technology Council (the governmental arm is the Office of Science and Technology Policy).

EBL: If someone had an appointment and there was an election and there was a change of guard would the PCAST members be reappointed or would they serve out their terms

Lane: I don't know. I can't answer that question. Let me return to how this Report came about. The President asked for the major issues and then came back in very early 1997 with a letter to the PCAST requesting that they address the issues that they had brought up in the previous letter to him. Ultimately those issues boiled down to questions of energy, environment and education. The PCAST then allocated six of its 18 members to each of those areas. One person amongst those six was chosen to chair a panel on that topic. Peter Raven was chosen to chair the panel on environment which came to be called the Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystems. He, with consultation with the other members of the PCAST who were on the panel, then appointed another thirteen scientists who have excellent reputations and had a broad range of expertise to be on the panel. Then there was a letter that outlined to the President that the panel would be considering what research in the scientific arena needs to be done in order for this Nation to better manage its biodiversity and ecosystems resources. There were several questions outlined as sub-questions to that, having to do with information sharing, biodiversity, ecosystem function and education about environmental principles.

EBL: Were all of these people volunteers

Lane: Yes. Absolutely. No one on the panel was paid for anything other than travel to come to meetings. It is completely voluntary.

EBL: How did you get involved with the project

Lane: Once the panel was constituted and it was about to begin to meet, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is a White House office under the National Science and Technology Council, searched government agencies for an individual to assist this volunteer panel by doing background research, drafting text and so on. In this case, that person turned out to be me. I was identified because I was just finishing two years as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, where I had worked in the Division of Environmental Biology; the two programs I directed were both deeply involved in biodiversity issues. While working with the panel, I was still in the employ of the National Science Foundation but was "on detail" to the OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy) in order to work with this PCAST panel. In addition, I was already personally acquainted with a number of members on the panel, which helped us move forward quickly with our work. They're a great, wonderful, well-thinking group of people who have the Nation's and the globe's best interests at heart.

EBL: Could you be more specific about your role in producing the Report

Lane: I did a lot of background research such as calling up various agencies, finding out who dealt with the issues the panel was interested in, finding out how much a given agency currently spent in that area on research, and so on. For that six months I spent a good deal of my life on the telephone! I organized meetings of agency representatives with members of the panel, so that the latter could ask the former questions. Once the panel had settled on the areas it wished to emphasize, and on an outline for the Report, I drafted text and gathered together sections of text written by panel members and compiled all of these into a series of drafts of the Report. The panel then commented on the drafts, and I made the edits until everyone agreed that we were satisfied. Then, I gathered photographs from panel members and others and did the final layout on the printed version.

EBL: You did really work hard then. What types of research will these ideas mostly impact if implemented

Lane: Seriously, anything that's covered by the phrase "biodiversity and ecosystems". The panel interpreted biodiversity to mean anything from the genetic level of diversity all the way up to the ecosystem level of diversity. It was the broad sense of biodiversity although certainly species were the focus of a number of members on the panel. If I had to narrow it down, the types of research that will actually be affected will be systematic and other research that is focused on species and their place in the world. There will be a tremendous amount of ecological and ecosystems level research. The notion of monitoring the health of our ecosystems and so on is highly promoted in the Report. That's an initiative that had already been started within the federal government and the Report endorses it. There's a huge breadth that will in fact be affected if everything's implemented.

EBL: Which agencies are directly addressed in this Report and why

Lane: The agencies that are addressed are all those federal agencies that currently have either management or research interests in these types of environmental issues. Most of those agencies are in four federal departments. The Department of the Interior is probably the one that springs to most peoples' minds because the Biological Resources Division of the USGS (United States Geological Survey) is in Interior, the Fish and Wildlife Service is in Interior, there are a number of other agencies within Interior that are involved in environmental issues of the type addressed in the Report. The agency in Interior that has a management mission is the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). In addition the United States Department of Agriculture is highly involved because of the Agricultural Research Service and its taxonomic mission, the Forest Service with its management mission and so on.

EBL: The BLM is separate from the USDA

Lane: Right. The Bureau of Land Management, the BLM, is part of the Department of the Interior, not the USDA. In addition, and this is what will begin to surprise many people, is that the Department of Energy (DOE) has interests in maintaining certain types of environmental research.

EBL: Global warming

Lane: Sure, because global warming and this whole notion of biodiversity and ecosystems impact on one another so the DOE (Department of Energy) is involved in all of this.

EBL: The DOE is at the level of the Department of the Interior, they're completely separate

Lane: Right. The one that will really surprise a lot people is the Department of Defense (DOD). But in fact, DOD several years ago produced a report about biodiversity on Defense held lands. For several years now, they have been funding actual biodiversity surveys of military bases that are in this country; in fact, military bases are in some ways better known for all the organisms that are on them than a lot of other places in the Nation. There are three more agencies which need to be named because they are not subsumed under one of these Cabinet departments. Those three are of course the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The three have a very important role to play but they are independent agencies because they are not assigned to a particular Cabinet department.

EBL: I had heard in the 1980's that there was an interest in maintaining Defense labs for environmental defense, and when the Gulf War broke out there was no need to protect these labs anymore because they could be justified on regular defense and so a lot of that interest died away. Do you think these biodiversity surveys also got lost at that point

Lane: No, because the Department of Defense has continued to fund biodiversity inventories through the nineties. I personally know several people who have conducted surveys on Defense lands through actual grants from DOD to conduct a plant survey or mammal survey or whatever.

EBL: So these are independent contractors, not military officials

Lane: That's right. There may be military officials involved of which I am not aware but the people that I know are independent contractors. An example is my colleague Craig Freeman here at the University of Kansas. He has had several of these contracts himself to do plant surveys of Fort Leavenworth, Fort Riley, other areas here in Kansas.

EBL: When you say the Cabinet departments, the Department of the Interior is a Cabinet department, the USDA, the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense are all Cabinet-level

Lane: That's right, and under them are various agencies. For instance, within Interior would be the USGS and one quarter part of the USGS is the BRD, the Biological Resources Division, which is what became of the National Biological Survey, that's where those researchers reside now, in the USGS/BRD. Also the Fish and Wildlife Service, which has major responsibility for endangered species and management of other species. For instance within the USDA one of the agencies that is significantly affected by this Report is the US Forest Service.

EBL: How often is a report of this kind on biology produced

Lane: This is an interesting question because I personally believe that the "Teaming with Life" report is unique. There are reports that address biological issues that are produced on a fairly regular basis by the National Research Council (NRC) which is the functionary arm of the National Academy of Sciences. They have produced over the years a number of reports, the most important one of which, relative to the PCAST report, is one that was titled, "A Biological Survey for the Nation," published in 1993. This was the NRC report, meaning a National Academy report, that called for a national biological survey agency. The "Teaming with Life" report is unique in that it specifically addresses the issues brought up by the panel and then looks at the government and says, "for this issue, this agency, this agency and this agency are currently spending x-million dollars per year on this effort and the panel believes that amount should be increased to y-million dollars". That kind of precision down to the level of agencies, and the recommendations about what particular agencies should do is unique. Most of the reports that have come out of the NRC have been balanced in that they always recognize the economic impacts of some of the recommendations being made and so on. I'm not trying to be critical of those at all. The difference with this one was the great deal of thought put into it about the economic impacts of some of the kinds of recommendations made by other reports that only call for "preserving the environment". Where this Report differs from all those, I think, is in actually making recommendations for expenditures or reallocations within the US federal government Executive branch to accomplish some of the goals that are stated in the Report. It also explicitly recognizes that we need to start working on the economic valuation of the environmental services that are provided to us by the planet. So there's a great deal of difference between this Report and other sorts of reports that may have been produced even at the same time or just slightly earlier, in that it really gets down to some nitty gritty issues and makes specific recommendations for changes that could be made that would further the general goals that all of the reports, including this one, have in mind.

EBL: Do you think this is going to be repeated in the near future or at a certain interval

Lane: Well, the PCAST does what it is requested to do by the White House. It can have some influence on what the requests are, but I don't know that there would be an immediate follow-up. Given the way the government works, it takes a while for such recommendations, if they're adopted, to become part of the way an agency conducts its business. Adoption of recommendations is done through the budget process. The report was released in January of 1998, so it was too late to affect the 1999 budget very much. But, preparations are being made in agency budgets that will begin to implement at least some of the recommendations in 2000, while looking forward to 2001 and beyond.

EBL: How might the ideas in "Teaming with Life" impact botanical researchers

Lane: There's a whole section of the Report that is titled, "Assess, Monitor and Study the Biota and Ecosystems of the United States." Botanical researchers along with researchers who look at other kinds of organisms would be impacted if these items are carried out, because there would be not only more research monies but in some sense some guided research monies for: "let's find out what we have in the United States. Let's know what organisms we have and also learn about its properties." Therefore, botanical researchers would have more opportunities for actually getting their work done, but funding for that work derived from the recommendations of this Report would mean that the work would have to be within the United States. Everyone on the panel recognized that these issues are global in nature, but the President requested that the panel provide recommendations for what could be done within the United States. So, the greatest positive impact will be on botanical researchers who are doing work within the United States to finish discovering all new species, to discover the properties of known and new species, and to get this information on line so everyone can use it.

EBL: Do you think these suggestions could have a result such as the study of microorganisms taking up almost the entire biology research budget for the next five hundred years

Lane: We need to know what organisms we have within the United States boundaries. Of all the species in the US there's probably only about thirty percent that have been discovered and described, if you think about all organisms including microorganisms. Angiosperms, mosses and liverworts and other things that live above ground are much better known, but on the other hand, so much of the rest of life on earth hinges on plants that knowing not only all of the plants but their properties and their ecological interactions will be highly useful to a future which manages ecosystems and biodiversity in a better way than we do now. So finding out about the properties of those plants, which of course immediately involves ethnobotany and economic botany, is a high priority and is mentioned in the Report. Plants are listed first in the section that deals with discovering the biota of the US.

EBL: What about competition for funding between disciplines

Lane: What we were talking about earlier at least in part had to do with the worry that the strictly molecular biologists would get all the money and folks who work on other aspects of plants (and microorganisms for that matter) might not see any impact on their research. It is, I think, up to whole-organism researchers to team with (this is why the word team, t-e-a-m is so important throughout the Report) other researchers such as molecular biologists. For example, we know very, very little about the interactions of fungi and other microorganisms with plants, and so therefore the research of the future as I personally see it, is that plant biologists will become much more involved in being part of team investigations of fungi-plant interactions or bacteria-plant interactions or other interactions of that sort because we're ready to move to that stage of investigation.

EBL: Do you think those taking a whole organism approach will be equal players on these teams

Lane: If they make themselves equal players.

EBL: How would they do that

Lane: I think amongst the ranks of people who have come out of departments named molecular this and that over the last twenty years there is a great realization that what they do in the lab is valid within a particular scale but that to become more valuable it needs to be expanded to how their result works within a larger scale. So it is a matter of teaming together the people that have worked for years on the larger scale with those bringing in this new type of information. I think that the workers on the larger scale will find that to be extremely useful and interesting and exciting but they have to be willing to make partnerships, to team with workers in areas that are on a different scale of investigation than they have normally been doing and it will take some synthetic thinkers to really bring all of that about. I don't believe that anybody needs to be shut out of this in terms of research. It is truly a matter of making teams.

EBL: Moving into more detail, what does the substance of "Teaming with Life" mean for researchers in ethnobotany and economic botany

Lane: Specifically, as I kept emphasizing in earlier responses, what we need to know is not only "what is out there" but also "what are the properties of what is out there". The answers to the latter question of course are the kinds of things that are dealt with by ethnobotanists and economic botanists. In addition, in terms of conservation, there's a section in the Report that deals with the values of genetic and of species diversity that talks about major crop plants and the need to understand and know what properties their wild relatives have so that those can be bred into crops. I would think that ethnobotanists and economic botanists would be involved in that activity to a great degree.

EBL: What about funding for studying potential major crop plants

Lane: Part of the difference between the Report and the kind of thing you're talking about has to do with the Report being able to make the major economic statements it attempted to make. So we dealt with wheat, corn and rice. But the point is, I believe, that the impetus of the Report over time will influence the USDA and particularly the Agricultural Research Service to expand its repertoire and be willing to fund research on crop plants other than just those major ones. In addition I would think it's time for researchers to start talking with agro-tech companies such as Monsanto and so on, because Monsanto has in fact decided to move towards the biological rather than the chemical management of crops. So I would think that realm of the private sector would be an area in which avid researchers could be discussing and making progress. It will take initiative on the part of those researchers to do that because it hasn't been done before, but that doesn't mean it can't be done in the future.

EBL: I do think that there is a fear amongst many ethnobotanists that the information that they get from human beings that they tend to bond to and care about would become the property of such a corporation as Monsanto and would, because of the current legal status that what comes out of it, become inaccessible to the people who gave the original information.

Lane: That is precisely the reason that the Report iterates on more than one occasion the need for the United States to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity so that it becomes a partner with the rest of the 170 or so countries that have ratified the Convention in making sure that the persons who provide information are the persons who receive recompense for that information.

EBL: What fail safes are or should be built into this process to guarantee that new funding really does go into multi-disciplinary research and not into business as usual

Lane: First I have to ask you what you mean by business as usual

EBL: Single-discipline NSF-type panels vetoing what is not most important to that particular panel. The idea that when money goes to an ethnobotanical/systematic type of effort that systematics would be what really has been dealt the funding. Or, if someone is working on systematics and is working with a molecular partner the idea that the molecular partner, having as a result of technological costs, the lion's share of the budget and thus bringing in the bulk of the overhead to their institutions, would also have most of the clout and control over what's really going on. You say team up with other people, well they have to be willing to team with you. I've noticed that in some of these types of partnerships that the molecular people seem to have more power.

Lane: Some such partnerships may be unbalanced in the manner you describe. However, the guidance that the Report gives to the NSF, for instance, is very clear that the partnerships are an important and integral component of the kinds of awards that should be made to develop this area. On the other hand, the other thing that I do have to say in fairness is that those kinds of issues that are at a personal level are not directly dealt with by the Report because the Report is written to be effective at the highest levels of government which is a very different thing than those individual levels. The Report asks for governmental agencies to partner with one another and to encourage partnership amongst the kinds of researchers that they might individually employ. The partnerships that the Report is really dealing with are those amongst government, private sector, NGOs and academia.

EBL: I can give you another example. I happened last night to be looking at an older issue of Restoration & Management Notes for another article and I stumbled across something by Edie Allen and other restorationists who were talking about an initiative within NSF for conservation and restoration biology. (1996. Allen, B., W. W. Covington and D. Falk. R&MN 14(2): 148-150.) The comments were that after about eight years of this panel being in existence only two restoration efforts actually got funded and all the rest went to conservation, mostly for classical protection of existing land.

Lane: Well, you have to remember that I cannot speak for NSF because I am no longer employed there, but commenting from the outside, I can say this. The NSF is charged in its mandating legislation, which dates from 1951, with funding research. To my knowledge, the Conservation and Restoration Biology competition was always geared towards "what is the research needed for us to learn how to do conservation and restoration". It was not ever intended to be about "let's go out and restore x-area". I am unaware of the article that you refer to and I am not completely informed about all the projects that were funded through the Conservation and Restoration Biology competitions, but I do know that in the spirit of the totality of NSF, the panels that reviewed those proposals through all the years that it has existed have always looked for what is the research, what is it that we need to know in order to be able to do conservation and restoration rather than the actual on the ground doing of them.

EBL: As long as these particular funds are not used for conservation alone while not meeting the mandate of the National Science Foundation to work out ways to do restoration.

Lane: That's right.

EBL: That's fine. It was just an example of where funding didn't quite go where people thought it would. I was wondering what this means for the team approach as conceived in the Report

Lane: Researchers have a notion of what they want to do and therefore they think that ought to be funded. The NSF, being a government agency, must respond to many other factors in addition to the pure curiosity of researchers. My personal view is that if researchers are truly curiosity-driven, then their curiosity should be large enough to be able to incorporate within their research agendas whatever it is that funders are interested in funding, alongside the "pure curiosity" agenda items of the researcher. That is, it's all about casting one's proposals within the parameters of the funder.

EBL: To be fair to you, I don't think they were just blaming NSF. I think they were also getting down on the restoration community for not knowing how to write grants that approached the actual mandate, so it's not just NSF isn't doing what they said they will, I don't think that's really the tone of the article. To me it's things I've seen because I've always been interested in ethnobotany, which is in a similar boat to restoration ecology, and having watched its ups and downs over the years. When I first went to Wisconsin and said this is what I want to do, people denounced me with, "why do you want to exploit the environment, why can't you just love nature for what it is" I remember finally getting through to Dr. Iltis (1998 Economic Botanist of the Year best known for his work on the origin of corn) what I wanted to do by saying, "do you want to feel good about protecting rain forests by knowing you gave it a great try and patting yourself on the back or do you want to feel good about successfully protecting them"

Lane: Well good for you! Few of the agencies in the government, are, you could literally say, curiosity-driven, NSF being primary amongst those that are. NASA is probably one of those in part. The EPA, unlike NSF, is what is called a mission agency, the Forest Service is a mission agency, the Bureau of Land Management is a mission agency. What that means is that their mandates in the laws that were passed by Congress that established them, gave them certain missions: "You the United States Forest Service are to manage our national forests." Essentially, the Forest Service's mandate is to preserve for use; that's why the Forest Service lets leases for cattle grazing on forest service lands, for instance, by private individuals, because their mandate is to hold on to all these vast regions of the United States that they actually manage and at the same time let them be used by private sectors of society. But, every now and then, there is an agency which is not a mission agency. The NSF is one of those. It integrally preserves itself as the agency that responds to the research world and funds those things which are deemed most important by consultation. NSF funds lots and lots and lots of workshops in order to get from the researchers out there, in whatever field, what's the most important thing to do in astronomy, what's the most important thing to do in whatever area that NSF actually funds in, which is a lot. Given that it does so much it's really quite surprising that it has a very small budget, it's only three billion a year. It's very tiny compared to, for instance, the EPA. There are some differences amongst agencies that just have to be recognized in managing these kinds of things. So to get back to the issue of business as usual, the Report actually does impinge greatly on the NSF because it recommends that the NSF fund certain kinds of things at a greater rate than it is currently doing, but at the same time it recommends that outside funding be provided by certain of the mission agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Service so that researchers who are not part of the government can provide information that's needed to better carry out the mission of the agency. The Report hits both sides, both the mission agencies and the granting agencies and it also recommends that some of the mission agencies also become granting agencies, basically. It's suggested they do this by partnering with an agency, such as the NSF, that has peer review mechanisms already in place.

EBL: That's a really important point. Which agencies

Lane: The "Teaming with Life" Report calls for, for instance, providing the Fish and Wildlife Service with more funding so that its scientists could do more research more rapidly but also so that it could provide grants and contracts to outside scientists so that they could help in that effort. At the same time, the Report urges that we get the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) up and working a little bit better than it is now so that once even little shreds of the information needed are available they'd be up and on line, and as those shreds accumulate, the contents of the NBII would grow. It was clear to the panel and it's incredibly clear to me that until we use the power of the computers and the networks that have been invented for us in the last ten or fifteen years to address biological issues, we won't be doing our best for the environment.

EBL: The report includes a number of case studies to illustrate specific needs. How were these examples chosen

Lane: There were various ways that those were chosen. Most of them were picked because of the interests of the individuals on the panel, but they were also considered in the light of what government agencies are already doing. Consequently, for instance, talking about endangered species and invasive species, government agencies are already working on those issues, so if you want them to do more in those areas you complement them on what they've already done and encourage them to do more. So there was that kind of choice. In addition there was, for instance, the example of the New York City Watershed, Box 1 in the Report, that was put in because one of the panel members was directly involved with that activity. Some of the other boxes were chosen the same way, for instance Box 7, the one on culture collections and the importance thereof. Rita Colwell (now Director of the NSF) was a member of the panel and she felt very strongly about that.

EBL: What will the recommendations mean for those seeking funding for research within the United States versus those seeking funding for research within other countries

Lane: Because of the way the government works, there are parts of the Executive branch that are focused inward on the United States itself and there are parts of the Executive branch that are focused outward on the rest of the world. The panel hopes that this Report will affect both sides of that such that it really shouldn't make a difference, but it might be interesting for people to think about home for a while. There was, in the panel, a tremendous push to make this Report global, about the world, because we all as scientists realize that geographical boundaries mean nothing to organisms and ecosystem level geochemical cycling and that sort of thing. However, the Report was a report to the President of the United States and therefore could only make recommendations that would affect only those funding agencies that fund things that go on within the United States. Consequently that's where the concentration of the Report was.

EBL: How was "Teaming with Life" received by the President and his staff and who received it at the White House

Lane: It's my understanding that actually the Vice President received it. When the Report was ready, the chair of PCAST and the President's science advisor took it to the White House and the person that they met with to actually physically hand a copy over was Vice President Gore. Of course the Report has been spread around electronically and otherwise throughout all of the government because in some senses when you say "the White House" you really mean the whole Executive branch of government. What's happened throughout the Executive branch, at least in those Cabinet departments and individual agencies that are directly named in the Report, is that the considerations of the Report have been taken into account as these agencies have formulated their budgets for the next fiscal year and the fiscal year after that.

EBL: That's wonderful. So this is being implemented then.

Lane: Well at least parts of it are. At the AAAS (American Academy for the Advancement of Science) meeting of 1998, which happened in Philadelphia in February, Dr. John (Jack) Gibbons, who was then the President's science advisor, during his introduction of the President, actually held up a copy of the Report. Shortly after the President's talk, there was a major presentation about the Report made by Dr. Murray Gell-Mann, a member of the panel, which was attended ultimately by about 250 people including several from the press.

EBL: If it's any comfort to you, Michael Donoghue did a similar thing when he gave the keynote address at the Missouri Botanical Garden meetings this past October.

Lane: That's good. Michael helped out a lot. Joel Cracraft was the systematist officially on the panel but Michael helped out as well and was right behind the whole thing. There are a lot of scientists who now realize the value of finding out how the government works, and who try to promote certain issues by means that match political realities rather than demanding that the government change its ways entirely.

EBL: How has Congress reacted to the contents of "Teaming with Life"

Lane: Multiple copies of this Report were distributed to every Senator and Congressperson. However, Congress can't really react until the budget proposals come forward from the Executive branch. The PCAST is a body that reports to the President, i.e. the Executive branch of government. Congress gets involved when the Executive branch makes a proposal to Congress-the budget for any given fiscal year is a proposal to Congress. At that point Congress can say, "yes we want NASA to have x-number of dollars to do this or we want the Fish and Wildlife Service to have y-number of dollars to do that". But, where the Report's recommendations have to be adopted initially is within the Executive branch.

EBL: So none of these proposed budget changes have been voted on yet

Lane: That is my impression.

EBL: This is all part of the President's package that Congress is going to consider now. He's proposed it, but they haven't had any votes.

Lane: That's right. This year's budget for consideration is the 2000 budget. It has gone forward to Congress with some of these things incorporated. The agencies involved are all aware that they need to continue to consider these recommendations in their future budget proposals.

EBL: Do you think that the budget surplus is going to assist with implementation of these ideas

Lane: Probably not.

EBL: That's a very positive attitude.

Lane: Peoples perceive the governments of their countries as needing to deal with human welfare directly. Consequently, the budget surplus is either going to go back in tax refunds or it's going to go to social security or for something else. It's going to go directly to people rather than indirectly to people through funding for research on how to protect and restore biodiversity and ecosystem services. It's the nitty-gritty basic budget, the underlying things they always argue over, that have to be affected. The arguments that need to be made will have to be made by people who work in government agencies that are touched on by this Report. They will have to constantly bring it up as, "but remember the recommendations of the 'Teaming with Life' report." They are doing that. There are champions of the "Teaming with Life" report in NSF, in NASA, in the USGS/BRD and in other agencies. It isn't necessarily going to affect everybody. But it can make an impact and it can continue to make an impact over several years.

EBL: It sounds like you don't have anyone who's speaking against it, or against these concepts or trying to undermine it.

Lane: There are other reports about other topics that have caught peoples' attention and taken it away from this Report. It is not my impression at this point in time that there's anyone trying specifically to sabotage "Teaming with Life".

EBL: What impact did independent lobbying efforts play in the development of the Report

Lane: Early on in the process, when we were in the information gathering phase, the panel had about four major areas they wanted to ask questions in and find out what was already going on in the government and in other sectors. We convened, for usually an entire morning or an entire afternoon, four groups of people who were folks from government and folks from NGOs that could answer those questions. In those sessions there were non-governmental organizations that had great input. TNC (The Nature Conservancy) being one of them which I could name as being particularly prominent because they consistently sent someone when we asked. There was NGO input into the Report.

EBL: There have been considerable problems in recent months between the President and Congress. How has this affected the implementation of the ideas in the Report

Lane: As I said earlier, the only way that Congress actually becomes involved is once the administration has formulated a budget that incorporates adjustments as suggested by the Report.

EBL: Has the difficulty between the Hill and the White House slowed things down Do you think they've had less time to think about this

Lane: I think that governmental agencies have gone on with their normal tasks. Congress will take up the budget when it is brought to the Hill.

EBL: Do you have any plans to make any kind of presentation to Congress

Lane: Dr. Raven presented the Report to Congress right when it came out.

EBL: How did they receive it Were they warm, chilly, curious

Lane: As far as I know it was well received. Dr. Raven would have answer to that question. I don't have a personal answer because I wasn't there, but I have heard reports that Dr. Raven's talk was inspiring and received a sympathetic listening.

EBL: What do you think will happen to the ideas in this Report if Al Gore is elected the next President

Lane: Mr. Gore is very, very much an environmentalist himself and is very concerned about dealing with issues of the environment. Consequently, I think that if Gore is elected this Report is not going to fall off the table any time soon.

EBL: What do you think will happen to the ideas in this Report if the next President is a Republican

Lane: I still think that there are ideas in the Report that would be used, because it certainly was not written with any political agenda in mind at all, but rather what is best for this country to do to manage its living resources. There are suggestions and recommendations made in the Report that would appeal to someone of a more conservative bent just as much as to someone who has a liberal bent.

EBL: You're not concerned that it might be rejected just because it is a product of the previous administration

Lane: Certainly that concern is there, but your questions were about the ideas. The ideas may need to be recouched for a different administration. In fact, there has been in this and the previous Republican Congress a great deal of support for research to better understand the environment. In fact, Senate Bill 1180 of the last Congress, the Endangered Species Restoration Act (known as "the Kempthorne bill") was co-sponsored by Republicans largely because it was a balanced document that is equivalent to what we tried to do with "Teaming with Life", to make the economy and the environment equally important.

EBL: What's most important in the Report that you want viewers of Ethnobotanical Leaflets to know

Lane: One of the major components of the Report has to do with information sharing. In fact, one entire section [Section Four] of the Report is about building a "next generation" National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). All the other sections of the Report have in them a portion that refers to getting the content and results of research out to the world so it can be used. So the message that I would like to get out to readers of Ethnobotanical Leaflets and also to the entire public is that we are on the verge of a completely new way to record scientific discovery and to get that discovery and information about it out to all those sectors of society that might be able to make use of it.

EBL: You mean computers

Lane: Well, computers are part of the picture, but so is the Internet, and software engineering, and information and library science, among other things. There is currently a National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). What the Report recommends is that we move that to a "next-generation" NBII which would have greater content, greater analytical capabilities and also greater computational capacity. This would be accomplished by establishing five or so major "nodes" scattered throughout the country. By connecting into one of these nodes via the Internet, people would have access to their computational capacity as well as to all the content of the entire system. At the same time, individual owners of particular datasets would still be free to be the complete managers of those datasets. What we're talking about here is a system that would provide to people the tools that they would need to simply and easily get access to information or to make information available.

EBL: What can individual researchers do to support the implementation of these ideas

Lane: Individual researchers can always do what any American citizen can do, which is to write to their Senators, their Congressperson, the agencies involved and so on, and present in succinct language their concerns about a particular issue and volunteer their efforts to resolve that issue in a wider forum. That's true within agencies as well. You can write to an agency and say, "I understand that you are considering XYZ right now. I would like to present my ideas on this subject either in person or on paper." That actually can be done and it's amazing how rare such a letter is, but those things do get listened to if people will take the time to write them and not write them in the heat of anger. I'm serious. Don't write it when you're ticked off. Write it when you're cooled down and can say, "I would like to present my views on this issue, which differ from those presented in XYZ document."

EBL: What's ongoing now, that persons interested in these matters should be aware of

Lane: Really it's the formulation of the year 2000 budget and the year 2001 budget of the federal government. There are many projects that are going on within the federal government that scientifically wise people in the rest of the country don't know about, I have discovered. It is a shame that this is so, because it's very easy to get on the Web and discover what the government's doing. One of the things that this administration came in with is, "we're going to make government transparent to the American people." They've partially succeeded, and now a person can spend some time on the Web and actually find out what's going on.

EBL: Do you have any particular things you'd recommend

Lane: For instance, the National Biological Information Infrastructure has a home page that is sited within the USGS/BRD home page and anyone can find out how they're building, what they're doing, how they're reaching out to elements of society other than government and so on. That's one very good example.

EBL: What would you personally like to see happen in terms of the general public and this Report

Lane: Deep down inside I think everybody on the panel would say we want to see the general public become aware of the vital importance of biodiversity and ecosystems to daily life, but that isn't going to happen overnight. Consequently, I would like to see the general public view the Report as, "Oh, gosh. Some scientists actually got real and recognized that these things that they want to do affect the economy and our lives and they're trying to look at it from a teamwork perspective and be willing to come to the table and talk over some of the issues."

EBL: How can anyone get a copy

Lane: Two ways. One is to write to the Environment Division of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the Old Executive Office Building, Washington D.C., 20502 and request a copy of the "Teaming with Life" report. The other way of course is to get it On the Web. The layout, the pull quotes and the pictures are not in the Web version.

EBL: Are there any recommended readings you would like to list with this interview

Lane: There are a selection of new books out on the market, such as Gretchen Daily's "Nature's Services", that discuss the need to recognize the real value of ecosystem services to society. The IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) has recently published a slim volume called "Biodiversity and Business" that would be very worthwhile reading. But most of all, "Teaming with Life" itself. I'd really like for the widest possible audience to see the balance that has been achieved in this Report by the PCAST panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystems.

© Miriam Kritzer Van Zant 1999.

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